In memoriam: Hayden Carruth

Though I never met, spoke, or wrote to Hayden Carruth--though he had, I'm sure, no inkling of my existence--I have had, in these years of fumbling my way into poetry, an attachment to him that has felt like love, like conversation, like an epistolary friendship. For me, he has been a living link with the true history of poetry--his yearnings and errors and delights and observations; the music of his lines and his language; his intensely personal engagement with literature; his swift comprehension of the wild beauty within our daily ugliness. His poems were magnificent risks. Sometimes they failed spectacularly. But at their best, they were songs that Keats, that Shakespeare, that Homer, that the Chinese poets might have understood.

from Late Sonnet

Hayden Carruth

And that I knew

that beautiful hot old man Sidney Bechet

and heard his music often but not what he

was saying, that tone, phrasing, and free play

of feeling mean more than originality,

those being the actual qualities of song.

Nor is it essential to be young.